1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is generally related to media broadcasting and, more particularly, to multimedia delivery systems for delivering media to subscribers over networks.
2. Description of the Related Art
The Internet is a rapidly growing communication network of interconnected computers around the world and is penetrating into every household in the United States and many other countries in the world. Together, these millions of connected computers form a vast repository of multimedia information that is readily accessible by users through any of the connected computers from anywhere at anytime. Multimedia information that is commonly available and deliverable via the Internet may include text information, images (or graphics), video and audio.
Continuous media information such as video and audio content are often the most demanded resources over the Internet. Delivery of such information over the Internet provides many advantages and benefits that cannot be matched by current television cable systems or broadcasting over the air. Given the vast accessibility of the Internet to the general population, many service providers or content providers are starting to broadcast continuous media programs over the Internet.
Users are, however, overwhelmed with the numerous media programs available through the Internet, cable or satellite systems. Recently, localized media service providers have consolidated some of the available programs and redelivered them with locally composed programs to their subscribers as value added services providers. One of the problems the media service providers face is how to efficiently control delivery and management of media services given the many variations that are presented. Media programs are typically received at media service providers from different sources and in different formats. For example, media programs can be received from the s transmissions, the over-the-air broadcasting, the wired cable systems, or private or public networks. The sources may include analog or digital formats. Examples of the digital formats are MPEG (e.g., MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG4, MPEG7), QuickTime, and the like). Delivering media programs to subscribers when these programs are received in different forms from various different sources poses tremendous challenges to the media service providers. At the same time, the end playing equipment has to be sophisticated enough to accommodate all forms of incoming media signals. As a result, many existing service providers can only provide limited media programs and services to its subscribers.
Generally, the media service providers have to be equipped with many different media management tools to manage, schedule, and deliver the media programs from the various different sources, and thus presents significant overhead and complications to the service provider. In addition, different media service providers desire to provide different programming to their own subscribers. Further, a media service provider may desire to deliver different programming to different sets of subscribers. For example, a media service provider might desire to deliver digital media programs to employees in a corporation while, at the same time, desire to deliver cable television (TV) programs to homes. Generally, two different conventional media management systems are needed to manage and deliver such different media programs. Moreover, whenever there is a change to the services being provided or the format of the media being received or delivered, the media management systems would have to be reconfigured and possibly with new equipment added. The lack of flexibility in configuration and management of conventional media management systems has significantly hindered the ability of the server providers to provide programs in various forms over different mediums and flexible customer service packages.
Thus, there is a need for improved approaches to configuration, management and operation of a media delivery system.